Gurney’s phone rang. He pulled it halfway from his pocket and glanced at the screen. It was Morgan.
“Sorry,” he said, “I need to take this.”
A sliding glass door led to a rear deck. He stepped out into the cool night air.
“Gurney here.”
“Dave! Can you hear me?” Morgan’s voice was charged with excitement.
“Yes. What’s happening?”
“Lorinda Russell called. She told me she just shot Billy Tate!”
“What?”
“She shot Billy Tate! She thinks he’s dead.”
“How did it happen?”
“He broke into the house. Through the conservatory, like the night he killed Angus. She heard the glass breaking and got one of Angus’s guns. She went out into the conservatory, he came at her with a scalpel, and she shot him. Twice. She said he’s lying there on the floor. She sounded freaked out by the blood. How fast can you get here?”
“An hour, if I leave right now. Who have you notified?”
“I sent some patrol guys over to secure the site, then I called you. I’m about to call EMS, Fallow, Slovak, Barstow. Hurry. I want you to be here when we interview Lorinda.”
“When we spoke to her after Angus’s death, she said she was bringing in a security company the next day to install cameras. If she did, get hold of the video files.”
“Right. Will do. Wow. Tate’s down! Hopefully dead. Jesus.” Morgan’s voice was breaking up with excitement. “I hope to God this means the case is over.”
40
Gurney stood on the deck, staring out into the dark woods, trying to make sense of this strange development. There’d been unforeseen twists in cases he’d worked on over the years, but this felt different. It felt like a fundamental dislocation. It made him wonder if his previous sense of the case had any basis in reality.
What motive was he missing that would account for Tate attempting a homicidal attack on Lorinda? And from a tactical point of view, why hadn’t he killed her the night he killed Angus? She was in the next bedroom, a convenient target. If he hadn’t wanted to kill her then, why now?
Madeleine stepped out on the deck. “Is there a problem?”
“Morgan just told me that the ‘Dark Angel’ who left the message on our barn has been shot. So the case may be coming to an end, but now I’m not sure what it was all about to begin with.”
“Do you have to know?”
“I’d like to.”
After a silence she changed the subject. “Did you by any chance remember the tulips?”
“Actually, I did.”
He retrieved the pots from the Outback and handed them to her.
“I have to leave now. Can you—”
“Explain that you’ve been called away on a police emergency? Of course. Be careful.”
There was no traffic on the route he chose from Walnut Crossing to Larchfield, and he drove well over the speed limit. A full moon was high in a cloudless sky, giving the landscape a silvery sheen and making his headlights almost unnecessary. As he descended the long hill into Larchfield, the surface of the lake was a sheet of pewter running through the center of the valley.
Soon he was proceeding along Waterview Drive, passing a succession of lakefront mansions, coming eventually to the roadside cottage with the little porch where Mary Kane had been murdered.
Why her and not Ruby-June Hooper, who’d encountered Tate less than a mile down the road? Gurney wondered for the twentieth time. Could that little mystery be a window into the essence of the case?
Immediately after the Kane cottage, he turned up the private road that provided access to the Russell estate and the web of Harrow Hill trails. As he recalled from his experience there with Morgan, the dirt-and-gravel lane soon twisted into a series of narrow switchbacks—tricky in daylight and a real challenge at night.
He finally arrived at the estate’s imposing drystone wall and stopped. Police tape had been stretched across the open gateway. A young officer with a large flashlight came to the side window of the Outback and pointed it for a moment at Gurney’s face.
“Detective Gurney?”
“Right.”
“You can go right on through. All vehicles are to be parked by the front portico.”
“Thanks. Is he dead?”
“Oh, yeah, he’s dead. I was one of the first responders, took one look, didn’t need to take another. Two shots. One through the chest, one through the jaw. Blew the back of his head apart. Only thing that kept it from flying all over that greenhouse was that hoodie.”
The officer lowered the tape, and Gurney drove through the open gate into the allée of tall trees that enclosed the gravel driveway on both sides. He parked the Outback next to the other vehicles by the columned portico—three Larchfield PD cruisers, Slovak’s Dodge Charger, a body-transport van, Fallow’s Mercedes, Morgan’s Tahoe, the crime-scene photographer’s Camry, and Barstow’s tech van. The time on the dashboard display was 10:15 p.m. as he stepped out into the chilly night air.
As Gurney made his way around the big stone house, he passed from soft moonlight into the stark brightness of the halogen lights illuminating the area between the conservatory and the woods. He crossed paths with the photographer, who was just leaving, a bulging camera bag slung over his shoulder.
Slovak and one of the uniformed officers were examining Tate’s orange Jeep, which was now at the mouth of the trail opposite the conservatory door. Two other patrol cops were using yellow tape to demarcate a wide corridor across the lawn. Through the glass-paned side of the conservatory, Gurney spotted Barstow talking to Fallow.
Morgan was standing by the open conservatory door. The emotion in his eyes was beyond anxiety.
“Thank God you’re here!”
“What’s the matter?”
“You’ll see.”
Gurney stepped inside.
What he saw at first was consistent with what he’d been envisioning, based on Morgan’s phone call and the comments of the officer at the gate.
There was nothing initially surprising about the prone figure lying in the middle of the stone floor, or in the now-familiar Tate uniform of gray hoodie, black jeans, and sneakers. The body was resting on its back, legs extended toward Gurney.
Large, still tacky-looking bloodstains on the floor to the left side of the head and chest suggested that the body’s original orientation had been facedown over those areas of pooled blood and that it had been rolled over by the medical examiner in the course of his preliminary in situ examination. The matching positions of the stains on the chest and neck areas of Tate’s hoodie were consistent with this scenario.
When Gurney moved closer, he noted the catastrophic damage caused by the bullet that had shattered the chin and jaw before continuing on its path and apparently—according to the gate officer—blowing the rear section of the skull into the hood of the sweatshirt.
As he approached still closer and was able to get a better view of the upper part of the face, he was baffled by its transformation. It seemed to have aged in a weird way, looking nothing like the mug shot he’d seen of Tate. Certainly nothing like the photograph in Selena Cursen’s bedroom.
The change was especially evident in the still-open eyes. They were smaller, darker . . .
He stopped, stared, took another step closer.
Was it possible?
He looked back at Morgan, who nodded in what looked like an ongoing state of shock.
Gurney bent over, peering intently at those small, black, dead eyes. Now he was certain.
The bloody body on floor was Chandler Aspern’s.
He stepped back, his mind racing to make sense of this bizarre development.